Book Review: Sligo.The Irish Revolution 1912-23

This new book on county Sligo’s experiences in the upheaval of 1912-23 is the first in a series of new works by Four Courts Press that will publish local studies of the Irish revolution. Michael Farry’s slim but useful book takes us through how Sligo experienced political mobilisation and guerrilla war.

Like most rural Irish counties in 1912, Sligo was dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party, the United Irish League and its press. The labour movement was getting organised in Sligo town and there were a number of bitter strikes on the docks. Similarly there was a small nucleus of IRB and Gaelic League activists but nothing that threatened the Home Rule Party’s hegemony.

However Home Rule itself was only moderately popular and UIL activists had to go to a great deal of trouble to organise rallies in support of the Bill.

Farry supports the thesis that the Irish revolution was triggered not so much by internal contradictions of British rule in Ireland as by the twin crises of the Home Rule crisis, where the rival unionist and nationalist parties formed antagonistic Volunteer militias and the First World War. In particular the suppression of the Easter Rising in 1916, twinned with the threat of conscription seems to have triggered the collapse in support for the IPP and the growth of the separatist party in Sinn Fein.

The Irish Parliamentary Party was destroyed by the combined crises of Home Rule, the Easter Rising and the First World War

The bind that the Rising put the IPP in – having to condemn ‘men who fought for Ireland’ – is demonstrated by one UIL rally in September 1916, ‘There has been a rebellion (applause) and the men who fought in that rebellion fought as nobly as any men ever fought in any cause (Loud and continued applause). They fought a good fight but gentlemen it was a foolish fight (Several voices, “No!”)’.

The War of Independence in Sligo

In 1918, in Sligo as elsewhere, Sinn Fein swept the boards. One factor made explicit here but not mentioned often enough in general accounts of the period, is that 1918 was the first general election in Ireland that even approached universal suffrage – by the Representation of the People Act that enfranchised all men over 21 and all women over 30, the electorate in the constituencies of North and South Sligo almost tripled. Where, in the county and urban district councils, voting was still a monopoly of rate payers, the Home Rulers retained a presence. The same was true in Dublin.

As elsewhere, the triple crises of the Home Rule stand-off the First World War and the Easter Rising finished the IPP in Sligo

In the War of Independence, despite having a number of powerful local personalities such as Liam Pilkington, Sligo had a slow start, much of the IRA’s early activity was social agitation for land redistribution. In late 1920, a number of flying columns were formed and the RIC police force suffered considerable casualties in a number of ambushes.

However, once paramilitary police in the Auxiliary Division and a British Army regiment were deployed to the county, violence fell sharply as the IRA fighters spent most of their time simply trying to avoid capture and blocking roads to impede the movement of Crown forces. In Sligo neither side was very ferocious, the British did not engage in wholesale house burning or assassination –though they did burn some creameries in retaliation for ambushes. And the IRA shot only one civilian as an informer in 1921. Only 19 people died in the county up to the Truce of 1921.

Unlike other parts of the Ireland, 1921 in Sligo saw a dramatic fall off in casualties

This is a pattern quite different from that in the southern counties such as Cork, Kerry and Tipperary that were put under martial law, and where in early 1921 hundreds were killed by both sides. British forces killed many civilians and the IRA began shooting anyone suspected of passing information to Crown forces. In north midland counties such as Monaghan, Longford and Leitrim the numbers were smaller but the pattern of escalation was similar. So Farry’s book is a reminder that British tactics did not always necessarily fail and that experience of the War of Independence was very varied across Ireland.

The Civil War

The Civil War of 1922-23 by contrast saw 48 people killed in County Sligo, almost all of them from July to September 1922 as Free State forces wrested control of the county from anti-Treaty forces. The Civil War also saw almost three times as much material damage as the war against the British. The main reason for this was that the truce period had left the IRA in control of the county, free to recruit and to arm. By contrast with their meagre armament from 1919-21, they now had ample rifles, machine guns and even had armoured cars. Due mainly, Farry argues, to the charismatic leadership of people like Pilkington and Frank Carty, the IRA in Sligo (with the exception of a south Sligo unit loyal to pro-Treaty TD Alex McCabe) almost unanimously opposed the Treaty settlement.

I was somewhat dissatisfied with Farry’s analysis of the civil war however. He argues, following Tom Garvin’s argument, that the IRA in the truce period, full of their own self-importance, operated as ‘public band’, defying elected and legal authority, interfering in local politics and effectively mutinying against the popular will in rejecting the Treaty. It is not that there is no truth in this; in Sligo Farry shows how they physically intimidated pro-Treaty politicians in the spring of 1922. But in Sligo at least, as Farry tells us, there were twice as many anti-Treaty as pro-Treaty votes in the election of 1922. The local IRA therefore clearly represented more than just themselves and a more thorough look at their politics might have been illuminating.

The Civil War was three times as destructive in Sligo as the War of Independence

Also, while Farry does cover the labour movement and the land question ( which contrary to what is often said, was far from solved by 1922), they disappear from the narrative by the civil war and events such as the 1923 election and the 1923 Land Act – both surely central in assessing the long term importance of the nationalist revolution – are not covered at all.

The sectarian or communal question is better covered. Farry shows that while never irrelevant, sectarian division between Catholic and Protestant was never the central axis of revolutionary conflict. In 1913, some Sligo Protestants did travel to join the Ulster Volunteers but in 1914, others offered to officer Redmond’s National Volunteers, who supported the British war effort in 1914-18. Protestants were never systematically targeted by the IRA in Sligo but in early 1922, with hundreds of Catholics being killed in Belfast and central authority evaporating with the British withdrawal from southern Ireland, some Protestants in the county did suffer from robbery and intimidation. As a result , most Protestants in Sligo welcomed the Free State restoration of order by mid 1923 with relief.

Overall this is a useful book and the prospect of more local studies like this being published is an attractive prospect.

5 Responses to "Book Review: Sligo.The Irish Revolution 1912-23"

First, this follows what looks like a fairly conventional line of argument, which does raise questions about the series as a whole. I’ve not read the book and don’t wish to be negative, but can we anticipate 32 books that account for the rise of Sinn Fein in this way? The boom in local studies is beginning to raise questions about the law of diminishing returns.

Second, has Farry drawn back from the intriguing argument prospected in his major study of Sligo, namely that the relative passivity of the county in 1919-21 generated among young men a desire to compensate? They had their credentials to prove, particularly returning soldiers who took a while to figure out how things had changed.

Third, the ‘public band’ argument. Voting anti-Treaty was not the same as supporting the Irregulars. Rather than making claims that the Irregulars were ‘representative’, I think we should be thinking instead about the ways historians can establish the extent of tacit and active support they attracted – and, crucially, how this was manifest. The numbers voting anti-Treatyite might be suggestive, but I think we can readily agree that they didn’t necessarily constitute an expression of support for war against the new state. This was a political culture pretty acclimatised to elections and it’s likely many anti-Treatyite voters simply accepted they had lost.

Fourth, regarding Protestant relief at the restoration of order, and this relates to point three. Doubtless this was the case, particularly as news of burnings and so on reached Sligo from other parts of the country, but many Catholics probably felt the same.

First of all I wouldn’t use the term ‘irregulars’ as it’s a propaganda term of the time to describe the anti-Treaty IRA, implying they were the ‘illegitimate’ faction.

I don’t see how the result of the June 1922 election can be taken to give the Treaty a mandate but the anti-Treaty vote in places like Sligo can not be used to indicate support for the other side. Now obviously yes support for armed guerrillas is not the same thing as voting, but this was true also in the earlier period, 1919-21. Add to that that many anti-Treaty politicians were the same people as anti-Treaty guerrillas. Now as regards ‘war on the new state’. I think the important thing to remember here is that this is not the way the anti-Treaty IRA saw what the civil war was about. Remember that the June election was just ten days before the attack on the Four Courts. The way the anti-Treatyites saw it, it was not that they had rejected an election and were attacking the Free State, negotiations were ongoing and, as far as they were concerned the Free State attacked them. Only after the Four Courts did it become (as they saw it defensive) war on the state.

Now as regards public support fro their activities in the civil war yes you’d have to look at things like how readily the population offered safe houses, would they hide weapons, did the National Army have many informants. In Sligo and places like west Mayo/Galway and Kerry (places with both anti-Treaty votes and determined guerrilla campaigns subsequently) I suspect there was a substantial amount of this kind of support. But certainly in Dublin, many anti-Treaty accounts repeat over and over, ‘the people were against us in the civil war’. The same is true in border counties Cavan and Monaghan by and large with an exception around north Louth/South Armagh.

Re the idea that the Sligo IRA had to prove themselves, Farry does mention this idea but doesn’t dwell on it so much.

Re the Protestant community, the point is that in the truce period rural Protestants were especially vulnerable to robbery and intimidation in Sligo and elsewhere (not necessarily from republicans) and it was the Free State victory that put a stop to that situation. So their relief was especially marked.

Thanks for your response. I agree ‘Irregulars’ is a tricky term. Let’s leave that for now.

Re. voting not constituting support for armed struggle that then seeks to uphold that vote. This is certainly as true of 1918 general election as it was of 1922, and in both subsequent phases different kinds of support for armed struggle evolved according to circumstances, principally in favour of the IRA and then the Free State Army. As such, I think we agree.

Giving the Treaty a ‘mandate’ and giving ‘support’ to the other side needs clarification. Accepting a political settlement through the ballot box requires a lower order of political commitment – often little more than weary acquiescence – than does supporting a guerrilla campaign against that outcome, but in democratic terms the weary acquiescence of one person is not of lower value than the activism of another. I guess we can agree that it’s equally true that voting against the settlement didn’t signify supporting resistance to it.

Hence, we agree on the need to consider the forms of support that were provided, figuring out the extent to which individual acts represented community support. But if we were to establish that widespread local support for the anti-Treatyite IRA existed – active or passive – we still wouldn’t be able to derive from this straightforward conclusions about legitimacy.* To do so, it seems to me, runs the danger of reading the Civil War as though Ireland was potentially subject to multiple partitions. In Sligo, the view goes one way and hence military resistance is legitimate; in Dublin it goes another and so the Free State forces acted legitimately, etc.

The people fighting the war, however, didn’t see Ireland as a series of county-based polities with the right to self-determination but as a single unit of especial historical integrity. As such, Garvin’s ‘democracy’ and Regan’s ‘counter-revolution’ theses need to be synthesised: making sense of the attack on the Four Courts, which I agree can be interpreted as precipitous, needs to accommodate both the threat of ‘immediate and terrible war’ and the outcome of the election.

I agree about the particular Protestant experience and this points to interesting parallels with minority groups elsewhere in Europe during the Long First World War.

Matt

* For what it’s worth, I find it pretty problematic when historians – almost always male – pronounce from their desks on whether a violent act was or wasn’t ‘legitimate’. This rarely advances historical understanding and often leads to online slanging matches, of which we’ve had more than enough!

It’s not for us to decide who was legitimate and who was not. We’re not gods. It’s by no means only men who argue over this though.

The point is to understand the way the opposing sides saw things themselves.

The anti-Treatyites did argue that the ‘people were stampeded [scared] into voting for the Treaty’. But it’s not the case that they sought to overturn the 1922 election by force of arms. In any event they had no time do so. Again, they viewed it that the Free State attacked them on behalf of the British and they were ‘defending the republic’. And there is no doubt that there was some (albeit minority) public support for them in parts of the country. In the 1923 election the anti-Treaty vote actually increased. So the ‘public band’ argument – that the anti-Treatyites were apolitical unrepresentative militarists – doesn’t really help us much to understand them or their supporters.

Now on the other side they viewed that as far back as April and March the ‘irregulars’ had been in armed defiance of the proto Irish state and the ‘the will of the people’. Whatever British pressures were brought to bear, the pro-Treatyites saw as irrelevant given that the Dail and now (a little more arguably) the people had accepted the Treaty. The Four Courts attack was therefore a logical step to end the anti-Treatyites intransigence. And they could have given up their arms and gone home at any point afterwards without punishment. And there was of course much truth in this too.

[…] were injured but it seems very likely to have been higher than in 1919-21. In neighbouring Sligo Michael Farry showed that the Civil War was 3 times as destructive as its predecessor. An embattled National Army […]